Under the Empyrean Sky (22 page)

Cael, still hurting, can’t help himself. “I was with your mother last night.”

Pow
. Another gut-punch. Cael doubles over. Feels a string of drool creep out over his bottom lip and dangle there.

“You’re dead, McAvoy. All of you are—”

“Put him down, Boyland.” Gwennie steps in next to the mayor’s son.

“What?”

“I said, put him down.”

Boyland drops Cael, whose legs barely manage to keep him standing.

“Now,” Gwennie says, “we’re going to take their deal and
go. We shouldn’t even be here. You really think a mayor’s son should get caught in a place like this? You really want your father to pay for what you did here today?”

Boyland’s thinking about it, his eyes roving. The thought bouncing back and forth around the inside of his skull like a rubber ball whipped against the wall. “Hell with all that. I want what they found.” Boyland points at Cael. “And I want
his
head on the end of my boot.” He practically barks it as he says it, lips wet with a shining froth.

It’s then that Gwennie gets real close to Boyland.

“You like the things we do together, Boyland? You like kissing me? Getting your hand up under my shirt? Or inside my pants?” She says it loud enough for only Cael and Boyland to hear. Those words cut Cael to the heart—he’s not sure whether she’s trying to help him or hurt him.

But then he sees that it cuts to the heart of another as well: Felicity’s knuckles go white around the handle of her sickle. So she heard, too. Gwennie keeps talking. “You want those things to keep on keeping on, then I suggest you leave this alone and we all say our good-byes. Otherwise, you and me will have a problem.”

It takes a moment, but Boyland nods. “Fine.” He steps back and points to Rigo. “Go start bringing out the gin, you little piece of crap.”

“Boyland!” Felicity snarls. “You’re just gonna bend over like that?”

“Felicity, leave it.”

“For that cooze?”

“She’s my Obligated, Felicity; you keep your damn—”

It all happens so fast.

Cael tracks Felicity’s gaze. Sees how it falls on Gwennie. Sees how it burns with a kind of hatred he doesn’t even see when Boyland looks at him.

Felicity pushes past Boyland.

The sickle knife is in her hand.

Gwennie’s facing the other way.

Lane cries out. Boyland, too.

The knife rises—the watery sunlight glints off the edge.

Then: a sharp crack.

The bones in Felicity’s hand snap like firecrackers going off.

The ball bearing—the one that just flew from Cael’s slingshot—falls to the dirt.

Alongside the corn sickle.

Lane swoops in and snatches up the knife. Boyland pulls Gwennie aside in a protective hug—a movement that burns Cael deep. Felicity drops to her side and rolls in the dirt like a shot dog, cradling her shattered hand, howling, sobbing. Somewhere in those bleats of pain, Cael hears her trying to scream Boyland’s name.

Mole runs away. He drops the chain into the dust and hightails it.

“Get out of here,” Lane hisses, gesturing with the sickle. “Go on! Go home. Tell your daddy if you want. Take this moon-cat with you.” He nudges Felicity with his shoe, spurs her to scramble to her feet and come up alongside Boyland—who pulls away from her.

To Cael’s surprise, they do as Lane says.

Boyland holds Gwennie close. And she holds him right back. Felicity flags behind, sobbing, begging for him to wait. The Big Sky Scavengers watch as the Boxelder Butchers retreat from the streets of Martha’s Bend, chastened, defeated.

The victory tastes of dust and bitter fruit.

GAMES OF CHANCE

HE SHOULD FEEL
good right now, but he doesn’t. Cael instead feels as if he’s got a nest of snakes balling up in his gut. His heart won’t stop pounding in his chest. He’s already gnawed his thumbnail down to the bloody quick. The scene replays out again and again. Boyland. Gwennie. Felicity. The breaking of bones. The knife in the dust.

This should be a good day. But it’s not. Not anymore.

“Go home,” Pop says. “It’s going to be dark before long.”

“Pop, that went sideways, and it’s all my fault.”

“You stood up for yourself.” Pop musses his hair. “You saved Gwennie.”

“I shot a girl.”

“Felicity Jenkins is barely a girl. She’s more like a wolverine in a dress.”

Cael feels as if he should laugh, but he can’t find the humor right now. “What if Boyland tells the mayor?”

“So he tells him. He tells him he caught you here. Or maybe he doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t want to admit he went sticking his hands in the honey jar. It’ll be okay.” That last sentence is a lie. Cael can feel it.
It’s not going to be okay.

“I think I love Gwennie.”

“I know you do.”

“But I can’t have her. She’s Obligated to
him
.”

Pop smiles a soft, sad smile. “I’ll tell you a funny story sometime. But all I’ll say right now is, don’t count your ace notes till the deal is done. In the meantime, we need to get you out of here. Just in case Barnes comes poking around our farm looking to confirm what his son tells him. Least that way we don’t get you in trouble.”

“Shoot, Pop, don’t even bother. Wanda’s boat ain’t any faster than a donkey with both his back legs broken. We won’t get home before dark. We’ll be lucky to get home before
morning
the way that piece of crap boat drags along.” Cael presses his face into his hands and moans.

“That’s why you’ll leave the boat here. Take the rail-raft.”

“The what-now?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

The twin rails dead-end against a backstop made of logs and railroad ties. Homer comes up behind them with Marlene, the two of them carrying a raft made of wooden planks lashed together.

Pop twirls his finger, asks them to turn it over.

“Look here,” Pop says, pointing out the four metal caltrops—one bolted to each corner of the raft. To Cael they look like a child’s jacks. But he knows what they are—he’s scavenged a couple dozen over the years.

“Magna-cruxes.”

They’re all gleaming steel and hard edges. A magna-crux is a simple-enough device—a person could make his or her own given time and materials. They’re just big magnets shaped into three-dimensional
X
s. Cael’s never seen them in action before, and when Homer flips over the raft—one-handed—he places it on the tracks. The magna-cruxes fit over the rails, letting the raft hover.

“A raft-rail,” Cael says. “Genius.”

Rigo and Lane show up with a couple of bags full of fruit and veggies.

“For the trip,” Lane says, biting into a pepper.

Pop puts his foot on the raft, moving it back and forth. “The raft is frictionless. She’ll go pretty fast if you want her to. We’ve cut a few short oar-poles; all you need to do is give it a few good pushes, and you’ll be zipping along at a fast clip.”

“Where’s it go?”

“Underneath our stable.”

Of course.
“That’s why I saw the vagr—er, Jed there.”

Pop nods. “He was coming to fetch me with the raft. Now, you boys go home. Get some sleep. It’s been a challenging day. I’ll try to come home later tonight. Oh, hey, the Lottery’s on tonight.” He winks. “Maybe we can forget all this garden nonsense if we win.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Cael steps up to his father, gives him a sudden hug.

“I love you, Cael.”

“Love you, too, Pop.”

“Give a kiss to your mother for me. Tell her I’ll be home soon.”

Cael pulls away and steps onto the raft. Rigo follows, waves. “Later, Mr. McAvoy.”

Before Lane steps on, he looks to Pop. “You really are a badass, you know that? I wish you were my dad. Then I could be proud.”

Pop shakes Lane’s hand. “We’re family, Lane. Don’t
ever think we’re not. Now, go! Go!”

The rail-raft starts to drift even before they use the oar-poles. They climb on board and Lane and Rigo man the oars, thrusting them downward and giving a good push—and the raft zips along like a greased-up piglet down a metal chute.

The back of the mayor’s hand cracks hard against Boyland Jr.’s face. Junior’s head snaps back, the cheek reddened, his teeth biting the inside of his mouth. He immediately tastes blood.

“You dumb shit,” the mayor says.

“You’re drunk,” Junior mumbles.

“Better than dumb!” The elder Barnes rounds his desk and plops down into the chair behind it, slouching as he does so. With a thumb, he spins the cap off a bottle of Jack Kenney whiskey, takes a pull right from the bottle. “Martha’s Bend. Martha’s Godsdamn Bend? You want to get me fired? Maybe you don’t like this house? Perhaps you don’t enjoy the
comforts
that my
position
affords—”

Junior’s mother pokes her head into the office. “Everything okay in here? Lottery’s on the Marconi in fifteen minutes. Just in case you want to listen.”

“Woman, get the hell out of here,” the mayor slurs.
He waves his hands dismissively, still holding the whiskey bottle. The booze sloshes up inside the bottle, almost spills. She leaves, and when she does, Junior feels the heat of his father’s gaze. “You’re as bad as she is. I see her in you.”

Boyland Jr.’s face still stings with the strike. He licks away a drop of blood trickling toward the inside corner of his mouth. He hates it when his father gets like this. Which is all too often these days. And it’s not just him. Half the town is drunk and pissed off anymore. It’s like they don’t appreciate what they have.

Savages. All of them. He won’t be like them.

He cinches up his wounded pride and says, “Sorry, Daddy.”

“Damn right you’re sorry.” The mayor tilts the bottle toward his son. “You want?”

“Nah, I’m… I’m okay.”

“For your face. Your cheek. It’ll numb it.”

“I’m all right.”

The elder Barnes narrows his eyes. “When a Heartlander offers you a drink, you don’t say no. That’s just good manners.”

Junior nods gamely, reaches for the bottle, takes a swig. It tastes like hot, scorched sugar. He coughs. His eyes water. He hands back the bottle.

“Smooth, isn’t it?”

“Real smooth,” Junior lies, his throat feeling as if he just swallowed a bunch of angry yellow jackets. He turns to go. “I’m gonna go grab something to eat before the Lottery.”

“Hold up. What happened out there anyway? What’d you find at Martha’s Bend, boy? I remember going there as a kid. When the road there was still open and not grown over with all that damn corn.”

“Nothing,” Boyland lies. Images flash before him: Cael’s defiance, Gwennie talking him down, Felicity going at her with a sickle. With a damn sickle! She can’t be on the crew anymore. Not after that. Damnit.
Damnit
. He shakes it off. “Place was, uh, already long picked over. The Empyrean, probably. You know how it is.”

“But you saw the McAvoy boy there.”

“Yessir.” He thinks to add, “And we beat his ass real good.”

“
He
didn’t find anything, either?”

“Not by the looks of it.” This isn’t a lie, but Boyland suspects Cael found something.

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“No. I don’t—I’m not sure.” Junior just wants to leave. He doesn’t want to be in this room anymore with his stinking skunk-of-a-drunk father. “He had pink hands.”

“What?”

“His hands were pink. Sweet smelling, too.”

“Like perfume.”

“Yeah. Like perfume. Strawberry perfume.”

Mayor Barnes leans back in his chair. The furrows in his forehead are so deep you could tuck a few ace notes in there and they’d stand up straight. The man takes another deep swig of whiskey. “Strawberries. Shit.
Shit
.” He sets down the bottle and recaps it. “That’s it. Lord and Lady, come and kiss my bum-cheeks;
that’s it
.”

The elder Barnes stands up, knocking over his chair. He steadies himself on the desk, blinks a few times as though to make the room stop spinning, and then marches over to his son and pats him on the cheek. “You did good, boy.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Junior says, not sure what he just did.

From the other room, Junior’s mother calls, “Lottery’s on!”

A big, goofy grin spreads across the mayor’s face like a pool of spilled pancake syrup. His eyes light up, and he licks his lips. “Hell with that Lottery. I just won a Lottery all my own, boy. I have to go make a call to a Proctor Agrasanto. If you’ll excuse me now.”

Giggling like a madman, Mayor Barnes pushes past his son and saunters out of the room, happy as a squealer knee-deep in his own shit.

The string of lights are lit only so far.

The cable ends, and with it the light. The rail-raft glides into darkness.

It’s a strange sensation, Cael thinks. It’s like floating. Or flying.

Riding the rail-raft isn’t that different from piloting one of the land-boats, but those still give you some sense of being connected to the ground: the corn tickling the underside of the boat, the horizon line separating ground and sky, the wind running its fingers through your hair. This is a frictionless, soundless slide through a black tunnel.

The boys don’t talk much along the way. Not about Martha’s Bend. Or Pop and his garden. Or Gwennie and Boyland.